Veeam and Sophos in Partnership

Veeam Software, Inc. announced a partnership with Sophos Ltd, in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service.

Veeam Data Platform will integrate with Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR), adding a critical layer of human-led threat detection and response to advance the security of business-critical backups vs. ransomware attackers who attempt to manipulate, delete or change the customers backup environment as a tactic in their overall attack chain to increase pressure on victims to pay the ransom.

With persistent cyberattackers constantly upping their game, the question is no longer if or when, but how often an organization will be impacted, making it more critical than ever for organizations to have the right protection and recovery capabilities in place. Together, the 2 partners’ technologies vigilantly detect cybersecurity threats, determine the warranted response and recover impacted data, providing organizations peace of mind knowing their data is always available and recoverable.

“The growing threat of cyberattacks can only be addressed by companies coming together to offer customers more complete and integrated protection,” said Danny Allan, CTO, Veeam. “Combining the #1 global leader in data protection and ransomware recovery with the #1 MDR offering provides customers with the most comprehensive cybersecurity protection and recovery on the market today. Keeping businesses running, no matter what happens, is central to Veeam’s overall mission, and by uniting with Sophos to create an end-to-end approach, we take another step in protecting customers from bad actors by strengthening their overall security posture and enabling radical resilience.“

Data Platform monitors an organization’s environment to detect potential threats vs. customers’ production workloads and their backup environment. Should a threat be identified, such as an attacker attempting to tamper with backups, Veeam sends an alert to MDR-a fully-managed threat hunting, detection and response service that provides a dedicated 24/7 security team that identifies and neutralizes complex attacks, including ransomware, network breaches, hands-on keyboard adversaries, and more. The MDR security operations team can determine if an attack is occurring and take actions to disrupt, contain and fully-eliminate the attacker.

“Active adversaries are remarkably adept at evolving their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), often outpacing the detection capabilities of many organizations, as evidenced by Sophos X-Ops threat intelligence. The need for secure backups is paramount, and always-on security operations is imperative in fortifying this business-critical data,” said Marty Ward, VP of technology operations, Sophos. “Sophos MDR is the most widely used MDR offering with more than 19,000 customers worldwide, and we look forward to extending this urgently needed offering to organizations using Veeam. Together, we’re keeping organizations running securely.“

Additional benefits of this partnership include:

• Defending Vs. Ransomware: Advanced threat detection and prevention capabilities from Sophos, with immutable backups and versioning provided by Veeam, ensure backup data remains secure and recoverable.
• Improving Threat Response Time: MDR security operations specialists execute immediate response actions to stop confirmed threats with an average response time of 38 minutes-96% faster than the industry benchmark.
• Identifying Internal Security Threats: Monitoring of internal and external threats like malware detect unauthorized or suspicious activity that could compromise backup data.
• Preventing Accidental Deletion: Backup versioning, audit trails, and immutable storage options safeguard backup data vs. unintentional actions.
• Maintaining Compliance: Robust data protection and security features can help organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and other industry-specific regulations.
• Satisfying Cyber Insurance Requirements: MDR helps satisfy critical cyber insurance requirements, like having 24/7 threat monitoring-reducing the likelihood of a claim denial and helping organizations get better premiums.

This Veeam Data Platform and Sophos MDR integration is expected to be available later this year.

“Coordinating cybersecurity and cyber recovery strategies gives companies the best chance of defending vs., and recovering from, a ransomware attack. ITOps and SecOps teams must work closely together for both incident response planning and crisis communications. Ransomware attacks are on the rise and customers require holistic solution that can assist them through the entire data security and recovery cycle. This partnership between Veeam and Sophos aims to combine key disciplines: the ability to detect cybersecurity threats, determine the warranted response and recover impacted data quickly and safely,” said Phil Goodwin, research VP, IDC.

“Backups are an increasingly attractive target for adversaries to destroy before launching ransomware. Security is our number one priority as a trusted MSP. We need to know immediately when a customer’s backups are being tampered with or when malware is present so we can quickly neutralize threats and preserve data integrity. We proudly protect our customers’ diverse environments with MDR. This new partnership extends 24/7 threat detection and response as an extra layer of security to our backup and recovery solution, Nevtec Data Protection Services (NDPS), powered by Veeam. Knowing that Sophos’ highly trained security operations specialists are monitoring our backups 24/7 and can neutralize threats within minutes is a tremendous value add,” said Steve Neverve, president, Nevtec, Inc.